GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HOW AFRICA BECAME BLACK • 381
lies only 250 miles off the East African coast, much closer to Africa than
to any other continent, and separated by the whole expanse of the Indian
Ocean from Asia and Australia. Madagascar's people prove to be a mixture
of two elements. Not surprisingly, one element is African blacks, but
the other consists of people instantly recognizable, from their appearance,
as tropical Southeast Asians. Specifically, the language spoken by all the
people of Madagascar—Asians, blacks, and mixed—is Austronesian and
very similar to the Ma'anyan language spoken on the Indonesian island of
Borneo, over 4,000 miles across the open Indian Ocean from Madagascar.
No other people remotely resembling Borneans live within thousands of
miles of Madagascar.
These Austronesians, with their Austronesian language and modified
Austronesian culture, were already established on Madagascar by the time
it was first visited by Europeans, in 1500. This strikes me as the single
most astonishing fact of human geography for the entire world. It's as if
Columbus, on reaching Cuba, had found it occupied by blue-eyed, blondhaired
Scandinavians speaking a language close to Swedish, even though
the nearby North American continent was inhabited by Native Americans
speaking Amerindian languages. How on earth could prehistoric people of
Borneo, presumably voyaging in boats without maps or compasses, end
up in Madagascar?
THE CASE OF Madagascar tells us that peoples' languages, as well as
their physical appearance, can yield important clues to their origins. Just
by looking at the people of Madagascar, we'd have known that some of
them came from tropical Southeast Asia, but we wouldn't have known
from which area of tropical Southeast Asia, and we'd never have guessed
Borneo. What else can we learn from African languages that we didn't
already know from African faces?
The mind-boggling complexities of Africa's 1,500 languages were clarified
by Stanford University's great linguist Joseph Greenberg, who recognized
that all those languages fall into just five families (see Figure 19.2
for their distribution). Readers accustomed to thinking of linguistics as
dull and technical may be surprised to learn what fascinating contributions
Figure 19.2 makes to our understanding of African history.
If we begin by comparing Figure 19.2 with Figure 19.1, we'll see a
rough correspondence between language families and anatomically